While Swinton was in Austin promoting her fantastic new film, "Only Lovers Left Alive," Swinton got in one delicious dig at Russian President Putin during an interview with The Daily Beast. "Well, Russia has the gayest president ever. No, that's an offensive thing to say -- not to him, but to the gay community," she quipped, in response to a comment about the Sochi Olympics.

A longtime advocate for LGBTQ rights, Swinton's first onscreen role was in "Caravaggio" by Derek Jarman, a legendary filmmaker who died of complications from AIDs in 1994. "Twenty years on and we're fighting for space that we had once," she said about her collaboration with Jarman during a Q&A at SXSW.

Appropriately enough, Swinton plays a luminous, ageless vampire named Eve in the upcoming film "Only Lovers Left Alive." Eve lives in Tangiers, while her broody, goth-as-heck lover Adam (Tom Hiddleston) hides out in Detroit, making reverb-heavy music and hiding from fans. Of course, long-distance relationships mean something entirely different to eternal creatures like Adam and Eve, who do their own thing a lot of the time. "This film is really about what seems to be a fairly radical notion, which is that you don't have to be like somebody to love them, and you can really love someone who's very different to you, and who might even be antagonistic to you, and you can properly be there companion without trying to f**k with them or edit them in any way." (Besides being fantastic, "Only Lovers Left Alive" is a great example of why Hiddleston needs to play Morpheus in the adaptation of Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman.")

The Swedish original to the 2010 American remake follows Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a 12-year-old bullied boy who finds friendship with the mysterious Eli (Lina Leandersson) who turns out to be a vampire. “Let the Right One In” reinvigorated the hackneyed vampire genre by blending a poignant young love story with moments of sophisticated horror. It’s hard to label the film as outright horror or drama since it uses both in such new ways to create a truly beautiful film.